The Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) is established as an independent authority responsible for specifying benchmarks, benchmarking procedures and verifying/publishing results for software systems designed to manage graph and RDF data. The council was established as an outcome of the LDBC EU project and was founded by the following members: OpenLink Software, Ontotext AD, Neo Technology, Sparsity technologies, STI International, FORTH Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, and Peter Boncz. Its actual membership is reflected on http://ldbcouncil.org/industry/members

LDBC aims to make insightful the critical properties of graph and RDF data management technology that allows information technology practitioners to make informed technology choices and stimulate progress through competition. In case of RDF data management systems, we hope that LDBC will make visible the benefits of the technology and bring RDF data storage technology to a maturity point that allows it to establish it as an accepted industrial solution. This includes the ability to compare RDF and graph solutions to a problem with existing solutions such as relational database systems, MapReduce systems and noSQL systems. In case of graph data management systems, we hope that LDBC will allow the industry to unify the graph data management functionalities. We also hope that RDF benchmark will inspire non-commercial researchers in academic institutions. And we hope it will drive innovation in new areas, such as inference at scale, query optimization taking into account (structural) correlation and expressing and executing complex or approximate graph algorithms in high-level languages.